Emotional states on Facebook 'contagious' research finds

Rose Powell

Scientists at Facebook changed hundreds of thousands of users' "news feeds" to see if reading more negative or positive content could affect their moods.

In a research paper released this week, the data scientists say they set out to establish if the well-documented phenomenon of emotional contagion, where one person's emotional state influences another, can take place online.

For a week in January 2012, the researchers reduced the amount of either positive or negative updates shown in the news feeds of over 650,00 English-speaking users.

"This tested whether exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviours," reads the paper.

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The researchers, including one of Facebook's in-house data analysts and two academics, found showing users more negative or positive posts did have an impact on what users shared.

"For people who had positive content reduced in their News Feed, a larger percentage of words in people's status updates were negative and a smaller percentage were positive. When negativity was reduced, the opposite pattern occured."

The researchers claim the fact that both positive and negative tinkering brought about changes means this is a case of true contagion rather than simple mimicry.

The scientists said they completely removed all emotional status updates from a group of test subjects, who consequently experienced a "withdrawal", or lower levels interaction and expression.

There was no need to request permission from users involved in the study as they had already consented to Facebook's data use policies by having an account.

Facebook's data use policy allows these experiments with a clause explaining user data may be used for "internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement".

The experiments were within the data guidelines as the researchers didn't view the updates involved, instead relying on a software to identify positive and negative words to assign sentiment.

The researchers suggest the research could be useful for public health issues given the link between mental and physical health.